Clearlooks-cairo has animated progressbars again, thanks to some evil hacks from Kulyk Nazar. In addition to animated progressbars, we also have fading checkboxes and radiobuttons. Pretty neat stuff!

But that’s not what I came here for. I’d like everyone’s opinion on the direction the progressbar should animate. Below are three progressbars. Two of them animate in a different direction, one of them doesn’t animate at all. Please let me know which one you like most by clicking on one of them.

Unfortunately, you can only vote once per IP address. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Oh, and feel free to tell me why you prefer one over the other, by adding a comment below.

Thanks!

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on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Linux, Clearlooks.
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84 Responses to “Cast your vote!”

Voted for left to right as it looks like you’re progressing. The right to left progress bar gives me the impression that I’m moving backwards, although this is probably because I’ve grown up with languages which read from left to right. May not be true for right to left languages. Looks awesome though!

I think left to right makes it looks like it’s moving in “the right direction”, since the animation is moving the same way as the bar. I do however feel that the animation is a bit to fast, perhaps it could be slowed down just a bit?

Much more appropriate would be seeing the actual progress happening too. When you don’t see the progressbar progressing the only one that moves “forward” is the LTR one.
When you have a progress happening LTR, and the animation goes RTL is a totally different story.
There are probably other situations too, but let us see the progress happen!

I’m not voting, my vote i a split vote between LTR and RTL. Animation is great!

Well, now I see that with a metalized 3D effect you would get a right-to-let working perfectly wit the paradigm of the screwdriver. Attach a ‘wall perforation’ loud sound and you well get no less than 34 enthusiastic industrial users switching to it.

Why is there a “no animation” option on the ballot? Animation is already optional (and disabled by default) in clearlooks. Please don’t let the anti-eyecandy mafia vote away the option for the rest of us to have animated progressbars!

You know why I vote right to left. The movement to the left creates the optical illusion that the bar is growing, even if it’s not. That’s the whole point of it, to ensure the user that something is happening. For that reason I believe that left to right isn’t correct, even if it seems more obvious at first. I don’t like the feeling that my bar is actually shrinking. What direction does OS X use by the way?

How about no direction/vertical animation? That way, it would still be obvious to the user that the program hasn’t frozen, but it wouldn’t make them think that it’s somehow making progress (even if it isn’t, as directional animation implies).

Either that, or just have the animation follow the same direction as the progress

I voted for none. Animation is very eye-catching and some progress bars just don’t need to be interrupting a user’s workflow by rotating at them (as per the window list flashing mentioned in a comment above).

I consider animation more of a feedback thing, so having constant animation on a progress bar not doing anything isn’t telling me anything. This would be eye candy for eye candy’s sake! If the animation were only while the progress bar was

I voted Right to Left … When I look at the progress bar as it “progresses” left to right, I think of the animation as tire tracks left behind.

I can understand the Left to Right animation also, but if I am staring at a progress bar long enough to see the animation it means its going to take a while. The L to R one tends to make me a little more anxious for the task to complete then the R to L one.

The R to L lets me know that a task is in progress and tends to have my eyes focus on the amount that has been completed, but the L to R animation tends to make me focus on the empty progress bar and how much is left to be done.

Hi,
thats basicly the glass half empty / full thingy. From right to left it has a negati v feeling, the bar tries to move to the left and thats not what we want at all. The other way round is more for the positive people, its pushing the bar to its limits. This is very motivating if true but people will be angry when not. But people would get angry anyways so I am positive today so left to right has my vote

For me it should be configurable between the 3 (or more) options. The default doesn’t matter as much.

What I would really like is that the thing was a lot snappier a la OSX (*sigh* we always end up on that system). I’m already running the animated theme on X 7.0 and the speed in’s that great namelly when I use the Widget Factory and move the bars with the mouse.

I agree that left to right looks best, but I also only use left-to-right reading languages. It would be interesting to see if this could be considered a localization issue: if right-to-left-language-speaking people feel more at home with the right-to-left animation.

This is no localization issue, since everything is swapped for right-to-left languages anyway (including the animations, although that might not be implemented in clearlooks-cairo yet).

The problem with this is that you can look at it two ways. For me the most notible thing isn’t that the animation moves to the left or to the right, but that it creates the illusion of either shrinking or growing. With left-to-right it looks like it’s shrinking, with right-to-left it looks like it’s growing. I don’t want my progressbar to look like it’s shrinking. Another problem with left-to-right is, that the animation speed and the actual progress speed cancel each other out. So if both move at the same speed, it would look like the animation is standing still. With right-to-left it’s the opposite, so the animation will look faster if there is actual progress.

Also consider that the animated progressbar in non-cairo Clearlooks moves from right-to-left, which also matches the original mockup by Jimmac.

Not that it really matters as long as the animation is disabled by default anyway, just making some points.

I think the reason people disagree here is the direction of the bars in the animation.

Some people will see bars moving L to R, and think of it as progress, other people will look at the data inside the bars, and L to R gives the illusion of pushing something down, instead of lifting something up.

I think if you keep it L to R but flip the bars so it looks like it’s moving left AND pushing something upwards it’d be easier for my brain to decode as progress

I think it would be nice if the animation signified something - perhaps only animating when the state is updated (thus showing that the application is doing something rather than locked up [GUI thread could still be animating], and also showing progress when too small to cause the bar to grow in length).

L-t-R is nice, R-t-L is OK, and I could probably even live with no-animation (though it doesn’t give the impression that Something Is Happening that the others do).

But for the love of god don’t make this a preference! I’m already the laughingstock of all my Mac friends for all the dumb preferences I already have to set, and I’d probably just pre-emptively commit seppuku if Gnome grew a “Direction that progress bars animate” preference.

I think that Scott Robinson put his finger on it. I too prefer that the animation move in the direction of the progress bar, and so I’d prefer that the vote choices read “in the direction of the progress bar”, “against the direction of the progress bar”, and “no animation”. However, I’m sure that the vast majority of progress bars move one way–growing to indicate progress–so in most cases this is effectively the same as the extant choices.

I voted right to left because it follows the logical motion and behaviour of a screw moving. Although at a fast constant speed the rotation may give the impression of backwards progress, if it moves only when subtle progress is made in the background it will be fine as well as give a better indication when the action stalls.

I voted for ‘No Animation’ because I don’t see the point of animating a bar that is already moving from left to right. There are other cues that could be added to the progress bar but animating the ‘progress indicator’ is just too distracting.

If the culture is LTR, then should move LTR
If the culture is RTL, then should move RTL
If the culture is neither, then should move in one or the other directions. (pick at random, could default to RTL since it is more commonplace in the worlds’ laterally-written scripts.

The second item I’d like to address is the animation’s obtrusiveness. Many comments express opposition to the animation on the grounds that it is “annoying” or “the progressbar is already ‘moving’ by filling up”.

For the case of the first complaints, the issue is that there is no good “animation” mechanism for standard widgets in GTK, so it would require some underpinnings to have a “draw-but-don’t-animate” widget. Perhaps a better workaround is to compile two versions of the engine out of the box, and when people choose the GTK theme in the list, let there be “Clearlooks” and “Animated Clearlooks”. Win-win.

[PERSONAL OPINION] Also, my aesthetics say that the progressbar’s two diagonal colors would be better if the difference was much more subtle. Granted, OSX has been doing this for years already and people there accept it as the status quo, but I think we can go the more understated route.

For the second group of people, complaining that we don’t need animation because the progressbar’s already “animated”, I’d remind them of the last time they sat in front of an unmoving progressbar, wondering if the application was crashed or still active.

I voted “no animation”.
Not that I don’t like it, but sometimes progress bars are used as static level indicators (for example in System Monitor, second tab, to show how much space is used in my HDs). Animations are out of place and misleading in such a case.
Maybe a way to programmatically (a new property in GTK?) tell the theme engine that a particular progress bar really is a static level bar could be the solution.
However, until a similar solution isn’t found, please turn progress animations off.

Voted for NO animations. It’s OK to have fading animations while mouse hover/leave, but to have it run constantly is quite distracting. Also if you’ve observed the progress bar progress, you automatically get an animation feeling due to the slanted stripes.

@Roberto P.
>>Not that I don’t like it, but sometimes progress bars are used as static level indicators (for
>>example in System Monitor, second tab, to show how much space is used in my HDs).
>>Animations are out of place and misleading in such a case.

System monitor dont use Progressbars to show HDD used space. So its not animated in any way.
And. There is way to make animation theme file deppend, even speed of progressbar animation could be themable.

LtR looks like it’s “pushing” for progress but not moving — or perhaps gives the illusion that it’s moving, when it’s not. RtL gives off “I’m working” vibes, but doesn’t give off any other (misleading) illusions. Interestingly, while LtR sometimes looks like the right edge is changing, RtL never does, perhaps because it’s seen as a solid “source” of the moving stripes. Whatever. The observation that it’s doing the same thing a drill or corkscrew would is neat, too.

Jj: But would those CPU cycles have been used, anyway? Whenever I see a progressbar, it’s because I’m waiting on something that’s not CPU-bound — CPUs are really fast! Progressbars I regularly see: downloads (network-bound), burning discs (optical drive bound), copying files (hard disk bound). The only times I’m CPU-bound are when I’m doing fullscreen graphics (OpenGL programs), and in those cases, they don’t use Gtk+ progressbars at all.

It’s notning but my mind. Yet “left to right” choice seems better, because it’s like a “pushing ahead wave”, and I like it.

I know, it’s all in my mind.

Despite I would rather “left to right”, i realised that, in a way, “right to left” make the progressbar advance, even it’s remaining at the same place. But such effect is better rendered in Panther, Your given animation can’t make me feel the same way.